This was originally produced as a social video. Below is a script version.
Make illegal any use of a person’s likeness in any AI-generated video. Do it now.
Here’s why.
For 150 years, courts have recognized something called the right of publicity — the idea that your face, your voice, your identity belongs to you. Not to a tech company, not to a political campaign, not to a creepy ex. You.
Continue reading Make it illegal to use a photo for an AI-generated videoIf there’s even a small chance of a really big thing happening, should you do it?
“The need to be first or to perish” is what set in motion the explosion of consumer use of artificial intelligence. That argument raised billions of dollars, set off one of the largest infrastructure investments in American history and set off a global arms race.
The company that set off the arms race is OpenAI, and its cofounder and public face Sam Altman. Altman wielded this argument widely: If OpenAI doesn’t race toward the possibility of superintelligence than an existing incumbent like Google will, or China will. But no one else, nowhere else, could have done this. At least not now.
Or so the argument goes in Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI published this year and written by journalist Karen Hao.
One Chinese researcher told Hao that no one would have been funded outside Silicon Valley with over $1 billion without a clear purpose, so we created the risk and the solution. As she writes: “everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable.”
Altman shares a birthday with the legendary physicist Robert Oppenheimer (“father of the atomic bomb”). Altman loves the comparison of OpenAI to the Manhattan project, though Hao notes that “he never seemed to add that Oppenheimer spent the second half of his life plagued by regret and campaigning against the spread of his own creation.”
At an industry event in December 2024, Altman’s cofounder and one-time chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said that “we have but one internet,” in referring to the source material that the AI industry has already primarily digested. Having consumed all of us, they seek more, Hao argues, in preferring the “empire” metaphor of the AI industry. The book is exhaustive and critical. A very worthwhile read for those following the industry, even though it goes into even greater detail on internal politics than I needed. It reads as authoritative.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Empire of AIWho do you think has a higher unemployment rate right now—recent college graduates with a philosophy degree or those with a computer science degree?
Yikes: it’s computer science, per the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s part of a massive change I’ve written about.
Continue reading Philosophy or Computer Science: Who Has Higher Unemployment?
